Twenty Minutes from Parkland, Two Teachers Work on Their Shooting Skills

A practice target after a 2013 firearms-training session for teachers in Florida.

Photograph by Brian Blanco / Reuters

Richard Smith is the proprietor and lead instructor at Firearms Training Academy, in Davie, Florida, about a twenty-minute drive south of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland. On Valentine’s Day, a nineteen-year-old who used to attend Stoneman Douglas killed seventeen people at the high school with a legally purchased AR-15. A few days after the shooting, Smith, who was introduced to me by one of his fellow-instructors as “Mr. N.R.A.,” planned a free “Train the Teacher” seminar for local educators at his academy, which is located in a strip mall between an African-food market and a fitness-and-nutrition shop, and consists of a single classroom with a couple of tables and chairs and a variety of training tools: plastic prop guns, magazines, targets. The walls are covered in educational posters that address the
basics: “Gripping the Pistol,” “Trigger Squeeze,” “Follow-Through.”

The seminar was held on Wednesday. On Saturday, at lunchtime, an hour after President Trump tweeted about the promise of “Armed Educators”—who “Must be firearms adept & have annual training” and “Should get yearly bonus”—one of the three teachers who had attended the seminar returned. Addy Martinez, twenty-nine, teaches third grade at nearby Cooper City Christian Academy, a small private school. She has waist-length hair and an intense gaze. She was with her husband, Jonathan, and a colleague, Donnie Mayle, a forty-one-year-old history teacher who is clean-cut and bespectacled. Last week, the administration and faculty at Cooper Christian discussed arming teachers, Mayle and Martinez told me. Most of those present approved of the idea, they said, so long as there was appropriate training. Teachers are not currently allowed to carry weapons on campus.

“We had a lockdown the day after the Stoneman Douglas shooting,” Mayle said. “It was a copy-cat threat. We had to stay in the same room for about six hours. No breaks.” Mayle, who said he “grew up around guns,” in Ohio, already conducts informal surveillance. “My classroom has two big glass doors, and I see everybody coming in. And I think, They’ll have to pass me first.” Cooper Christian isn’t gated, or patrolled by guards during school hours, but the video monitors were recently upgraded, and all visitors, even parents, must make appointments. “If someone unknown is in the parking lot, I go ask for I.D.,” Mayle said. “Now I’m on guard even more, after Stoneman Douglas,” he added.
Martinez and Mayle both described teaching as their calling. “I had my own business for twenty years,” Mayle said. “I made more money. But I’d do anything for these kids. If that means checking on cars, fine. If that means a gun in the class, O.K.”

Mayle owns multiple handguns, as well as an AR-15. “We just want to take all the measures and precautions,” he said.

“I wouldn’t mind the extra responsibility,” Martinez told me. “You wouldn’t need to pay me extra. I told my husband, ‘I’d give my life for those kids.’ I would.” She went on, “I’m not saying give a gun to every teacher and expect them to know what to do. But strategically placed and trained teachers with guns, I see the need for that. Train me.” Martinez currently has a membership at a local shooting range, which offers a ladies’ night that she often attends.

Mayle, who enjoys hunting, said that he is “as ready as I need to be right now” to patrol his school with a gun. “I feel confident I won’t do anything that’s crazy or harmful,” he said. At that very moment, Mayle revealed, he was carrying his Springfield Xd .45 handgun, concealed in a tuckable hip holster, as he frequently does off campus. Martinez, it turned out, was armed, too: she had a Ruger SR22 pistol hidden along her abdomen with a strap. (Both teachers are licensed to carry concealed firearms.)

Mayle and Martinez both believe that arming teachers is among the best ways to make schools safer, along with hiring specialized security, installing metal detectors, and “addressing all the mental issues that are at the core of this,” as Mayle put it. “In a perfect world,” he went on, “we’d have the money for all these things. But metal detectors cost money. A simple solution is guns.”

It would also be good, Mayle said, “to bring God and prayer back into the classroom, bring our core values back, to help prevent these mental problems.” He acknowledged that this wouldn’t be easy to accomplish, given “where we’ve gone as a society.” But the history teacher also said, of school shootings, “It’s not as big of an epidemic as it’s made to be in the media. Since the eighteen-fifties, there’s been school shootings almost every year.” (While it is difficult to tally school shootings farther back in the historical record—even recent data can be hard to come by—it is generally recognized that shootings like the one carried out at Stoneman Douglas have, in recent years, become more common.)

How would it work, exactly, having armed teachers? “They should have handguns. Whatever police officers carry,” Jonathan Martinez, Addy’s husband, said. He’d been sitting quietly at a table. “Maybe a Glock 17, or 19. Twelve to fifteen rounds.” Jonathan was also wearing a concealed weapon.

“Yeah,” Mayle said., “I don’t think we need AR-15s, necessarily, at the school. My goal wouldn’t be to spray random gunfire.” He added, “Just have them wear a 9mm sidearm.”

Smith approved of this suggestion. “But remember,” he said, “we might have to look at adjustable back-straps, because the gun needs to fit your hand.”

“We have two kids in the school,” Jonathan went on, referring to Cooper Christian. “I want my kids’ teachers to be armed and ready to protect. These teachers spend more time with my kids than I do with them. Them having a gun, that gives me peace of mind.”

Addy said that she’s bothered by misconceptions about how armed teachers would act. “There are so many memes out there that upset me,” she said. “I saw one of a teacher pointing her gun at a student and saying, ‘Throw that gum out, Tommy!’ That would never cross my mind.” She added, “We wouldn’t even leave guns lying around for students to find.”

Mayle wasn’t keen on the idea of keeping school guns in a locked box in the principal’s office, though, as some in favor of arming teachers have suggested. “I’d like to have the option to keep the gun on my side,” he said.

“You’re not gonna have enough time to run to a locked box to put your fingerprint,” Addy Martinez said, agreeing. “They should be holstered.”
Eventually, the conversation turned back to Stoneman Douglas, and then to the relative wisdom of teen-agers. “Last week they were eating Tide Pods,” Smith said, referring to the fringe phenomenon of young people posting online videos showing themselves eating detergent. Martinez laughed, and Mayle nodded. “We should listen to what they have to say,” Mayle said, alluding to student activists’ comments on gun control. “But you’ve got to take into account their maturity level.”

It was time to shoot fake guns. Smith presented a Smith & Wesson M&P training gun, equipped with a laser that could be pointed at a reactive target ten feet away; the target has a sensor that indicates where a “fired bullet” has made contact.

“If I see a dot, I’m doing O.K.,” Smith said of the laser. “If I see a dash, it means the gun is moving when I’m pulling the trigger.” He turned the target on. When a timer sounded, he swiftly picked the gun up and fired, from about twelve feet away. The target showed the three dots where he’d hit it: a couple of bull’s-eyes in 2.2 seconds.

“You should be able to get a gun out of concealment, up on a target, and firing shots in two seconds or less,” he said to the teachers. They nodded.

Next it was Mayle’s turn. Smith told him, “Hold the gun as still as possible while you work the trigger.” The timer sounded. No bull’s-eyes, but a few close calls, and he’d shot quickly enough. “I play a lot of Duck Hunt,” Mayle said.

Addy stepped up. Her shots were tightly clustered around the center of the target.

“Well, my classroom is only about half the size of this room,” Addy said.

“But, under stress, your marksmanship deteriorates by forty or fifty per cent,” Smith noted. He pointed to a larger target in the shape of a human torso. That’s what the teachers would need to be able to hit, if a school shooter appeared. “The thoracic cavity is where all the good plumbing is at,” he explained. “This is where you’re going to be able to stop the threat.” He continued, “We also have the head shot. That’s even harder. Especially when it moves.”

After they were done with the exercise, Martinez and Mayle made plans to return to the academy. Once they’d left, Smith offered his appraisal of their skills. “They need some help,” he said.

Charles Bethea is a contributing writer for newyorker.com, and has written for The New Yorker since 2008.